Although Adela Navarro Bello has seen her editors murdered for covering the Mexican drug cartels, and has received death threats herself, she has no intention of slowing down when it comes to reporting on the violence in her country.

The general director of Zeta newsmagazine in Tijuana, Mexico, is one of four brave women journalists to be honored by the International Women’s Media Foundation at the 2011 Courage in Journalism Awards for risking their lives to cover the news. Two events are slated, for October 24 in Los Angeles and October 27 in New York.

We recently spoke with Navarro about the dangers her job entails, self-censorship in her country and why investigative journalism is more important than ever before. An edited version of the interview follows.

More: What led you to journalism and covering such a dangerous beat as drug trafficking?

Adela Navarro Bello: The drug trade in Mexico and the empowerment of drug cartels and their leaders is a reality that we, as journalists, can’t pull away from. At Zeta, we practice investigative journalism, with independence and freedom—this is how we deal with subjects that affect the society in which we live. In this moment, in my country, the subject of organized crime has led us to violence, with more than 56,000 murders in five years, the uprising of new cartels. Not writing about them or investigating this matter won’t make them disappear. On the contrary, the degree of impunity with which they operate, with the support of governments, police and corrupted judges—this problem will grow.

More: You feel an obligation to your readers.

AN: For Zeta, our readers are the most important thing in the world. They are the reason we get around. We owe ourselves to them and we investigate for them. Our readers provide us enormous feedback, not only through the letters they send to us, but through the complaints they make. The subjects that they’re interested in, that’s what we investigate. This is why I can say that 60 percent of what we publish comes directly from our readers. In 31 years of existence, we have offered investigative journalism, and that’s what they demand. At the same time, there is criticism of our work.

More: How did the murders of two of your Zeta colleagues affect the work you do?

AN: Those were very difficult moments for us at Zeta. Today, there are a few co-workers who lived through the murder of [co-founder and editor] Héctor Félix Miranda in 1988—I started my career at Zeta in 1990. We learn to live through this, to suffer through this and to demand results, as [co-founder] Jesús Blancornelas taught us to do via Zeta—to build a strong defense so that this murder won’t go unpunished too. Because the man who ordered Félix Miranda's murder was never arrested, and the person suspected of doing this is Jorge Hank Rhon, he is a public person in this city where we have our offices. The people who know form a part of the editorial team at Zeta [and] continue fighting for what Jesús wanted, which is a solution to this case.

In 1997, 10 assassins from the Arellano organization tried to kill Jesús Blancornelas when he was the general director of our publication. During the ambush, Luis Valero Elizalde, his bodyguard, was killed. Blancornelas spent two months in the hospital, and during that time the editors led this publication and opened an investigation, in [the course of] which they determined that the Arellano drug cartel did participate in the crime.